A New ZigBee IP Standard?

An interesting announcement. Let’s see what develops.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol.

5 Likes

standards https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

12 Likes

They finally understood that things are not going this way. :smiley:
.

image

5 Likes

Many years ago (for those of us who remember), there were two competing standards for HD Video: These are BluRay and HD-DVD … Then one day the key stake players decided to standardize and that ended up with killing HD-DVD. I recall players and movies being heavily discounted back then. My concern, or maybe a point worth discussing is this:

  1. Many of us have invested heavily in one/few technologies among the many available today.
  2. Is there a risk, with such multi-lateral effort, that some standards/technologies will suddenly ‘disappear’ ?

Granted, everything technology-related is ultimately ‘ephemeric’ and what is accepted today is by nature destined for the dustbin tomorrow.

Any comments/visions/risks do we foresee ?

Video standards depend on a constant stream of supplies to be useful.

Your current locally controlled Smart Home equipment will still keep working even if it is no longer sold and the manufacturer ceases to exist. that has already happened, in some cases. They are developing an inter-operable standard where they still hope to make money from subscriptions. They may or may not move or discontinue their current cloud services. That is always a risk when using cloud-based products.

1 Like